Out of Power Almost 7 Years, Blair Is Still Haunted by a Legacy of War

Tony Blair, seen giving a speech at the University of Hong Kong in 2012, said on his website that it was wrong to blame the 2003 invasion of Iraq for the violent divisions now racking the country.Credit
Antony Dickson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

LONDON — Twiggy Garcia, a part-time bartender, had talked with friends about making a citizen’s arrest if he ever got near Tony Blair, the former prime minister who led Britain into war in Iraq. But he never seriously imagined it happening.

“Then one day he just appeared,” said Mr. Garcia, who was making cocktails at the Tramshed restaurant in London this year when Mr. Blair arrived to eat.

Mr. Garcia put his hand on Mr. Blair’s shoulder and announced a citizen’s arrest for crimes against peace. Mr. Blair, having experienced something similar four times previously, did not seem that surprised. “He had a look of ‘Here we go again’ plastered over his face,” Mr. Garcia said.

Mr. Blair led his Labour Party into power in 1997 in a landslide victory and was prime minister for a decade, winning two more general elections along the way. He pulled Labour toward the political center, helped negotiate a peace deal in Northern Ireland and presided over a generally healthy economy.

But now, out of power for almost seven years, he remains defined in many Britons’ eyes by one issue: his steadfast support for the United States and President George W. Bush in the Iraq war, a decision that isolated him from much of his party and continues to haunt his legacy, especially with Iraq now fracturing into sectarian violence.

Mr. Blair has increasingly been defending himself, and he injected himself into the debate again this weekend, posting a lengthy essay on his website on Saturday asserting, among other things, that it is wrong to blame the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States, Britain and their allies for the violent Sunni-Shiite divisions now racking the country.

It is “a bizarre reading of the cauldron that is the Middle East today,” Mr. Blair said, “to claim that but for the removal of Saddam, we would not have a crisis. And it is here that if we want the right policy for the future, we have to learn properly the lessons not just of Iraq in 2003 but of the Arab uprisings from 2011 onwards.

“The reality is that the whole of the Middle East and beyond is going through a huge, agonising and protracted transition,” he continued.

“We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that ‘we’ have caused this. We haven’t. We can argue as to whether our policies at points have helped or not; and whether action or inaction is the best policy and there is a lot to be said on both sides. But the fundamental cause of the crisis lies within the region not outside it.”

Mr. Blair’s analysis did little to convince his critics, the most vociferous of whom have long demanded that he face war crimes charges.

“I think there is something about Blair that really makes a red mist descend upon people who would otherwise be able to judge more objectively,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London.

Mr. Blair’s friends say they are baffled by the ferocity of his critics. “There is something unfair and unreasonable and irrational about it,” said Alastair Campbell, once Mr. Blair’s spokesman, who said his former boss is judged by different standards from those applied to other ex-leaders.

Mr. Blair suggested that his most outspoken opponents did not represent public opinion. Speaking to reporters in his office in Mayfair recently after a speech about Europe, he defended his record in and out of office and played down episodes like the “citizen’s arrest” encounters.

He said it was wrong to assume that someone “who comes up to you and wants to make a name for himself represents the whole of the people.”

“In that restaurant you had him, you also had a lot of the tables which I would go around and talk to people — and people were perfectly friendly,” he said. “As I said, I won three elections. I didn’t lose them.”

He traced some of the criticism to his tortured relationship with the British press, parts of which he once likened to a “feral beast.”

“I’ve always had this problem with sections of the British media,” said Mr. Blair, looking tanned, wearing an open-neck shirt and drinking coffee (which he had given up while in power).

“I still think that there is basic support for that center-ground, progressive British politics, irrespective of whatever attacks there are on me personally,” he said.

Mr. Blair is the Middle Eastern envoy of the “quartet” of the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia. He has started arguing publicly for Britain to remain within the European Union, and campaigns for action against climate change.

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He runs a number of charitable initiatives, including the Africa Governance Initiative, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and a sports foundation, and a lobbying operation, Tony Blair Associates, which has advised controversial clients, including the Kazakhstan government.

But for many, his record is defined by unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — the latter justified partly by claims, later proved incorrect, that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction.

A British inquiry into the Iraq war, established in 2009, is yet to report, and recently announced that it will publish only parts of correspondence between London and Washington. Even so, it could pose another threat to Mr. Blair’s reputation.

In Britain, former prime ministers enjoy less automatic respect than, for example, former presidents of the United States.

And Mr. Blair, now 61, quit government while relatively young. “You find this more and more with leaders who leave when they are in their early 50s,” he said. “There was never any way I was going to retire and play golf.”

Mr. Blair’s critics come both from the left of his own Labour Party, which resented his backing for Mr. Bush and his shift toward the ideological middle, and the right, where elements of the Conservative Party disliked Mr. Blair’s support for European integration and later judged him as hypocritical for cultivating the rich and powerful.

His controversial friends have included Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister; Rebekah Brooks, the former newspaper editor and executive; and Wendi Deng, the ex-wife of Rupert Murdoch.

Over the years Mr. Blair’s wife, Cherie, a prominent lawyer, has also attracted her share of media criticism.

A recent article in The Financial Times by Philip Stephens, author of an evenhanded biography of Mr. Blair, accused him of a “single-minded, almost manic, quest for personal riches,” adding that, by advising Kazakhstan, “he is paid handsomely in lending a cloak of respectability to a Central Asian tyrant.”

Reports that Mr. Blair’s wealth amounts to 100 million pounds, or $170 million, may be an underestimate, the article said.

Mr. Blair denied that. “I’m not worth 100 million, a half of it, a third of it, a quarter of it or a fifth of it or really a fraction,” he said.

He could make much more money were that his objective, he said. However, he needs finances for his foundations, which employ more than 200 people, he added.

“The business side we do is both interesting and fascinating, but also necessary to build the whole infrastructure. So I think at some point people will understand what I’m trying to do, which is about making a difference and not making money,” Mr. Blair said, sounding slightly defensive.

But so reviled is Mr. Blair in some quarters that a website, set up by the writer George Monbiot, offers cash to those who attempt a citizen’s arrest on the former prime minister.

Mr. Garcia, who quit his bartending job to concentrate on being a D.J., said he had consulted the website, arrestblair.org, before his encounter with Mr. Blair. He received more than 2,200 pounds, about $3,730, but said his motive had been neither cash nor publicity but a desire to hold Mr. Blair accountable for Iraq.

A version of this article appears in print on June 16, 2014, on Page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: Out of Power Almost 7 Years, Blair Is Still Haunted by a Legacy of War. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe